Tonier than thou

The Tories have discovered a new weapon in their fight against Labour: Tony Blair

LET us give some praise where it is due. The prospect of the “25 new policy initiatives” that were to be “rolled out” by “Iain's team” at the party conference in Bournemouth was not one to turbo-charge the pulse. Such is the decline in the fortunes of the Conservative Party that its policy pronouncements are now viewed as being like those of the Liberal Democrats—quite interesting to those who are making them and to a small band of political fantasists, but of little moment to normal people.

This, however, is unfair. Even policies that have virtually no chance of ever being implemented can make a difference politically. If they are coherent and attractive, they can provide the basis for a galvanising renewal of intellectual self-confidence. Most of all, they can communicate, however dimly, a sense of direction and purpose to the wider electorate. In short, a party without policies is a party without a strategy. And a strategy is now something that the Tories, for the first time in a very long while, appear to have. Whether or not it is a winning one is another matter. It is, in nutshell, to be more Blair than Blair.

Most Tories date the beginning of their long fall to Britain's ejection from the European exchange-rate mechanism a decade ago. Others believe the party has been cursed ever since the regicide of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. But a more convincing explanation is that the Tories have never had an answer to Tony Blair. Since he took over the Labour leadership in 1994, the Tories have only once, briefly, during the fuel-tax protests of September 2000, been ahead in the opinion polls. More than anything else, the failure to understand the Blair phenomenon has condemned the Conservatives to political irrelevance.

But now, Iain Duncan Smith and “his team” believe they have found a better way: rather than fight Mr Blair, enlist him. Mr Blair proclaims every other day that he wants his government to be judged on its success in revitalising the public services. And in doing so, he castigates both himself and his party for having been insufficiently bold during Labour's first term. In his speech to the Labour conference last week—“at our best when at our boldest”—Mr Blair declared that the battle for public-service reform was between optimists, like himself, and pessimists (a malign but heterodox group that seems to include the Treasury, trade-union leaders, much of the civil service, a good few cabinet colleagues and, of course, the Conservative Party).

The prime minister even admits that previously he had not properly grasped the importance of changing structures. Establishing standards at the centre, shoving in more money and minutely monitoring the “outputs” of every nurse and teacher, he now realises, won't on their own get the job done. What's needed for better schools and for hospitals that serve their communities, he now proclaims, is a multiplicity of providers, close partnership with the private sector, the maximum amount of local autonomy and a range of choice for economically empowered consumers who expect nothing less. Although couched in the language of social democracy, Mr Blair is now saying the kind of things that Mrs Thatcher in her heyday would only have dreamt of.

Mr Blair's talent for stealing his opponents' clothes has, up to now, made the job of opposing him peculiarly difficult. But now the Tories see an opportunity. As one shadow cabinet member put it to Bagehot: “Tony is helping to make popular things we believe in, but that most of his party, and above all Gordon Brown, are very uncomfortable with. Partly because it's him that's saying it, these ideas are no longer inevitably seen as code for cuts in tax and spending, but as the only way to change things for the better. It's a new consensus, but it's a consensus that plays to our strengths rather than Labour's.” In other words, if none other than Mr Blair says that the old, centrally-planned statist model can't deliver, the Tories are liberated to follow their instincts and brush the dust off policies long ago deemed too radical.

Tony's new best friends

The picture of Mr Blair the Tories would like to conjure up is that of a would-be reformer doomed to failure by unreconstructed colleagues, such as the increasingly demonised Mr Brown. As the shadow chancellor, Michael Howard, said in an effective speech this week: “The rhetoric may be bold, but the reality is Brown.” The health spokesman, Liam Fox, was even more explicit when talking about the foundation hospitals that Mr Blair and the health secretary, Alan Milburn, see as the anchor of their NHS reforms: “Let me be frank. The concept of foundation hospitals goes clearly in a direction with which a future Conservative government would be comfortable. It is a concept we would want to dramatically expand. Indeed, Alan Milburn is breaking ground for us in a way that will make further reforms easier—which is why it is so important that Gordon Brown's objections are overridden.”

On October 9th, no sooner had the government announced a resolution of the argument between Mr Milburn and Mr Brown over whether the new hospitals should or should not be allowed to borrow without Treasury constraint (Mr Brown won on points), than Dr Fox popped up again to say how much he hoped this wouldn't undermine what Mr Blair and Mr Milburn were trying to do. After making a speech that was pure “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, Oliver Letwin, the shadow home secretary, cheerfully admitted to sounding very like Mr Blair. It was just a pity, he said, that Labour's centralising tendencies sometimes led it astray.

Can this co-option of Mr Blair for the Conservative cause possibly work? It's both risky—people may well conclude that whatever difficulties the prime minister faces, he's a good deal more likely to succeed than Mr Duncan Smith—and much too early to say. But it is the most intelligent thing the Tories have tried to do for quite some time.